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Author: Keith Brown

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It’s now been one year since the Facebook IPO, and you probably would have been better off investing your money in some Iraqi Dinar or Bitcoins instead. A $10,000 investment in Facebook fared much worse than the same amount invested in Apple, Google, the S&P, and the Nasdaq. I don’t think anybody is scratching their head about this one. Please don’t act surprised In 2010 Zucks was saying things like this. “At this point in the company’s evolution, I don’t see a huge need for the company to be throwing off a huge amount of profit. What’s the point?” – …continue reading

I was researching some competitive insurance and real estate searches this evening when I stumbled upon something pretty interesting. It was an extremely competitve search for “apartments for rent“, a query with 4,000,000 broad match monthly searches. At the very top of Google was forrent.com, with a woman (Kaitlin Doud) displayed as the rich snippet. Ignore the purple highlight, this was an uncookied, logged out of Google search…and I tried with several different browsers and one off rank checkers. Now surely Kaitlin can’t be credited with Google+ authorship for a directory of apartments for rent with 12,000,000+ of pages of …continue reading

I love to read lists of the best companies to work for each year, because it’s no secret what separates the good places to work from the great places to work. You don’t need a degree in HR to understand that the companies with strong cultures, led by level 5 leaders, are usually at the top of the list year after year. “Happiness is really just about four things: perceived control, perceived progress, connectedness (number and depth of your relationships), and vision/meaning (being part of something bigger than yourself).” ― Tony Hsieh Instead of working for a company, why not …continue reading

Politicians aren’t solving the debt crisis, so entrepreneurs around the world are. Bitcoin, a decentralized digital currency, was created in 2009 based on an open-source p2p internet protocol. Think of it as the Napster of the international economy. In late 2011 a bitcoin was worth $2, last week it was $180, at times reaches as high $218 per bitcoin. Now there is more than a billion dollars of bitcoins in circulation, and the number keeps growing. The chart below shows the market value (in USD) of a bitcoin over the last 12 months. There are even stories of freshly minted …continue reading

Bing data now shows that adding site links or “deep links” can help you capture more than 75% of the clicks for a given query term. We’ve all seen the old charts that show the #1 organic result captures around 35% of the clicks for a given term, then it’s down to 10% for #2, and so on. Honestly I don’t really want a percentage of the click distribution for my branded terms, I want ALL the clicks. Maybe I’m just greedy, but I feel like if you create that impression volume you alone should reap the rewards for it. …continue reading

Face it, if you want to recruit the best and brightest minds, you’re going to have to go after top young talent in your industry. There are new rules for attracting young talent in the workplace, and some of them might surprise you. Recently, Cisco released a study about what young professionals want in a work environment. They studied more than 2,800 young people from 14 different countries around the world. They asked them questions about what they are looking for in a company, and what kinds of perks would sweeten the deal. They also asked about deal breakers, or …continue reading

The following is my rough outline from the 11AM SXSWi session featuring Pinterest Co-Founder Ben Silbermann. Lots of great advice on monetization, design, building a successful business, and social communities. Q&A with Pinterest Co-Founder Ben Silbermann Job History Started in sales support for Google, working specifically with Adsense. Quit Google to develop iOS applications, before starting Pinterest. Background The idea came from visiting people’s homes, and seeing “collections” of people’s lives that needed to be shared online Wanted a person’s “board” or collection on pinterest to be more beautiful as a whole than each image could be individually. Design Quality …continue reading

Everyone loves to believe they are “in the know” when it comes to their industry. There’s always this core group of people in any given social subset that calls themselves insiders, heck they even created an app about it. You think internet marketing is any different? Psh…EVERY SEO thinks they are the world’s leading expert on black hat techniques. And quite frankly we all “know somebody at Google”. Yeah at the end of the day let’s just be honest, we are just as dysfunctional as the airline industry. Whether you agree or disagree with the folks over at Duck Dynasty, …continue reading

Earlier today I had to do something that I don’t have to resort to very often, revoke the permission of a Facebook app I had previously authorized. I checked my Facebook timeline tonight, and discovered a slew of posts to my wall from Pinterest. Although I hadn’t used Pinterest in a few days, the posts were made since I last checked my Facebook wall this afternoon (in the last 6 hours). In hindsight I wish I had screen capped some of the posts, but I was so upset my first and only thought was to delete the posts and revoke …continue reading

While most people are looking for ways to get more of their images pinned, Pinterest quietly added a feature that allows Webmaster to block users from pinning their content. What if I don’t want images from my site to be pinned? Just add a meta “nopin” code to the <head> section of your website or blog. The tag universally applies to every page (and more importantly every image) hosted on your site. <meta name=”pinterest” content=”nopin” /> Pinterest says in their help section that when a user tries to pin content from your site, they will see the following message. “This site …continue reading